Friday, September 10, 2004

BorCon Day 0 - Friday, September 10th, 2004

Arrived at BorCon and registered today. Met another Delphi developer on the train that is actually from Nampa too. We visited some and found out that he actually lived a crossed the street from one of the houses I grew up in. Small world.

We went looking for dinner and the drug store to pick up a couple of things I was missing. Found a great pizza place and had the Great Chicago Fire - it had Italian sausage, cilantro and sport peppers. Sport peppers turn out to be like pepperoncini peppers, maybe a little spicier. I had never heard of them before.

Found the drug store and picked up the few things I was missing, including breakfast and snacks for the next couple days.

Decided to look over my bag and its contents. First of all we got a nice backpack again this year. It looks like a regular old backpack, but is actually a laptop bag as well. Pretty cool.

The badge holder this year doesn't have a slot to hold my pen. That is a really unfortunate. I thought that slot was very useful. The pen is a lot larger this year, maybe it wasn't going to fit in the slot. Personally I'd rather have a smaller pen that I could keep in my badge even though this seems like a rather nice pen.

In the bag we have:

From Borland we have the BorCon program, conference evaluation form, discount price list and an Exhibit Hall Treasure Hunt card. It has a map of the exhibit hall, and if you get a stamp from each exhibiter then you are entered into a drawing for $250 bookstore shopping spree or other prizes. No Conference CD, I will need to see if I just am missing that.

From Microsoft:

  • Tablet PC Developer Start CD version 1.2 from Microsoft.
  • Windows XP Service Pack 2 CD. They are really trying to get people to install that one. I'm still not sold on it though. I'll give it some more time and wait before installing it.
  • ASP.net Resource Kit - bunch of 3rd party ASP.net components and some other related stuff I guess.

We then have a few papers:

  • An add from ProcessExchange for a presentation on Agile Methodologies.
  • A quiz from Versant to pickup a free prize and be entered in a drawing for an iPod.
  • HP Software Developer program flyer. See DevResource.hp.com
  • The final issue of Delphi Informant from August. They will be missed.
  • The September issue of ASP.net Pro magazine. Which includes Virtual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition Beta on CD.

And of course the T-Shirt which is really cool this year.

Time to hit the sack. I'll have more to share tomorrow.

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